After it’s over, a Turkish guard with a big mustache approaches Jacob.
“Who are you?” he asks him in Turkish, in a threatening tone. “Jew? Muslim? Rus?”
“Can’t you see, stupid? I’m a dancer.” Jacob pants. He leans over, resting his hands on his own knees, and then he turns away from his inquisitor as if wanting to show him his bottom. The guard grabs for his saber, offended by that “halfwit,” but Old Shorr, who until now has been sitting in the cart, calms him down. He takes his hand.
“What kind of idiot is this?” asks the guard, furious.
Reb Elisha Shorr says that he’s a holy fool. But this means nothing to the Turk.
“Well, if you ask me, he’s a crackpot,” he says. Then he shrugs and walks away.
III.
The Book of
THE ROAD
13.
Of the warm December of 1755, otherwise known as the month of Tevet 5516, of the country of Polin, and pestilence in Mielnica
The travelers stand grouped together on the shore of the Dniester, on its lowlying southern bank. The frail winter sun casts red shadows over all that it can reach. December is warm—strangely, abnormally so. The air is an interleaving of warm gusts with freezing, and smells of newly dug-up earth.
Before them is the high, steep bank on the other side, now vanishing into shadow, the sun having dipped below the dark face they must now scale.
“Polin,” says Old Shorr.
“Poland, Poland,” everyone repeats joyfully, and their eyes are made narrow as slits by their smiles. Shlomo, Shorr’s son, begins to pray, to thank the Lord that they have made it in one piece, all together. Quietly he speaks the words of his prayer; the others all join in, mumbling, careless, their minds on other things, loosening the saddles, removing their sweaty hats. Now they will eat, drink. They need to rest before the crossing.
They don’t wait long. Night has barely started to fall when the Turkish smuggler arrives. They know him, it’s Saakadze, they’ve worked with him many times. When it is completely dark they ford the river on horseback and in their carriages. The only sound is the splash of the water beneath the horses’ hooves.
On the other side, they separate. The steep wall seems dangerous only when seen from the other bank. Saakadze leads them along a path that slopes up gently. Both Shorrs, with their Polish papers, ride ahead to the guardhouse, while Nahman and a few of the others wait a bit in perfect silence, then go down some side paths.
Polish sentries guard the village, not admitting travelers from Turkey due to the plague. Old Shorr and his son, whose papers and permits are in order, argue with them for a while to divert their attention, then bribe them, for it gets quiet, and the travelers continue on their way.
Jacob has Turkish papers that say he is the sultan’s subject. That’s how he looks, too, in his tall hat and his fur-lined Turkish coat. Only his beard sets him apart from a real Turk. He appears fully at ease, with just the tip of his nose sticking out above his collar. Perhaps he’s even sleeping?
They reach the village, quiet and pitch-black at this time of night. No one stops them; there are no sentries. The Turk bids them farewell, stuffing the coins they give him under his belt; he is proud of the job he’s done. He smiles, baring a set of white teeth. He has deposited them before a little inn, where a slumbering innkeeper evinces great surprise at these late arrivals, at their having been admitted into town.
Jacob falls asleep immediately, but Nahman spends the whole night tossing and turning in his not particularly comfortable bed, burning candles and examining the sheets for bedbugs. The tiny windows are filthy, with desiccated stalks upon the sills; perhaps they were once flowers. In the morning, their host, a middle-aged Jew, thin and ill at ease, serves them heated water with some matzah crumbled in. The inn looks quite luxurious, but their host explains that as the plague has racked up victims, people have grown more and more afraid to leave their homes, terrified to purchase things from those who have been stricken. They have already eaten their own stores here at the inn, so he begs their forgiveness and urges them to arrange for their meals on their own. As he says all this, he keeps his distance, avoiding their breath and their touch.
This strange, warm December has reinvigorated those minuscule creatures that ordinarily, fearing frost, spend this season hibernating underground; spurred by this unseasonable warmth, they have surfaced to destroy and kill. They lurk in the dense, ineffable fog, in the stuffy, toxic cloud that hangs over the villages and towns, in the fetid vapors given off by infected bodies that people everywhere refer to as “pestilential air.” As soon as they make their way into a person’s lungs, they enter the bloodstream, igniting it, and then they squeeze into the heart—and at that point, the person dies.
When in the morning the newcomers go out onto the streets of this village, which is called Mielnica, they see a big, almost completely empty market square with low homes around its edges and three streets that issue from it. There is a terrible damp chill—apparently the warm days are over now, or else here, on this high embankment, the climate is completely different. In the puddles in the mud they marvel at the low-racing clouds. All the shops are closed. Only one empty stall still stands on the square; a hemp rope flutters before it, the kind a hangman might employ. Somewhere a door creaks open, and a bundled-up figure flits past the houses. This is what the world will look like after the Final Judgment, emptied of people. How hostile, how nefarious it is, thinks Nahman, as he counts the money in his pocket.
“They don’t take money from people with the plague,” Jacob said when he saw Nahman about to go shopping. He was washing up in the icy water, the southern sun still preserved in the skin of his naked torso. “Don’t pay them,” he added, splashing cold water all around him.
Nahman has ventured confidently into a little Jewish shop, having seen someone emerge from it. Behind the counter stands a little old man, as though his family has required this of him, to make contact with the world so that its younger members will not have to.
“I would like wine, cheese, and bread,” says Nahman. “Several loaves.”
The old man gives Nahman the loaves of bread, not taking his eyes off him, as if surprised by his foreign-looking costume, though here at the border he shouldn’t be surprised by much of anything anymore.
When Nahman, having paid, starts to leave, he sees that the old man is staggering strangely, unsteady on his feet.